Speaking of the Leopard intro movie, I just spent a few minutes watching the intro movies from all the major releases of OS X. It's fun to see just how much better each version gets. Check them out:
I'm pretty sure 10.6 Domestic Shorthair's intro movie will be downloaded directly into your brain. I heard that's a new feature they're working on. That and a tabbed Finder.
Leopard installed on my new iMac in about twenty minutes. Granted, this was a fresh install and I skipped the DVD verification as well as opted out of installing all but the Gutenprint drivers and English languages, but that's still pretty fast. So fast that I missed the new Leopard intro movie. I walked out of the room expecting the installation to take an hour and came back shortly after to find the setup panels waiting for me.
I had seen the leaked movie on YouTube a while back, but that's not exactly high quality. And since Leopard is the first version of 10.5 to be released in a fully HD age, I was looking forward to seeing the new movie. Luckily, ArsTechnica uploaded it as part John Siracusa's excellent and exhausting review, so I could finally watch it in high resolution.
It's gorgeous. If this was your first Mac, and your first experience with an Apple computer was the intro movie, you'd be in heaven. Hell, it's my 7th Mac and I fell in love all over again. These little touches are part of what continues to separate Apple from the rest of the pack. Contrast this excellent movie with the Windows Vista boot "orb" to get a better idea of what I mean.
I'm having some OS X deliver déjà vu here. I just noticed that my Leopard FedEx delivery, which was scheduled for delivery by 10:30AM this morning was updated with an exception: "Future delivery requested." Enraged, I called FedEx. The representative told me this:
Apple is shipping lots of computers [sic] today. Like over 130,000 packages in NYC alone. So we're having trouble delivering them. Apple guaranteed 10:30AM delivery through us, but we're too busy so we're pushing it back. You'll have it by 5PM today, we promise.
I would have been okay with this response except for the fact that this is exactly what happened with Tiger two years ago in NYC. And with Tiger, the delivery didn't happen until Monday.
Here's what they did last time (and what I'm betting they do this time as well): They change it to "future delivery" and promise it will be here by 5PM. Then, at 5PM, they update it with a new exception that states a delivery attempt was made but no one answered. Except they don't even try.
There's no way to prove FedEx didn't come to the house and once the delivery exception says failed delivery, you have to wait until the next business day (FedEx ground will deliver on Saturday, but not overnight, so we're talking about Monday). All FedEx has to do to lighten their load is update customers with bogus information and they have until Monday to deliver.
Why does Apple rely on a company who has "trouble delivering them" for a release like this?
Update: Wow, it actually got delivered! When the FedEx guy handed me the box he asked, "Can I ask you what this is? I've got like 500 more in my truck!" I told him it was a new version of Apple's operating system and he just sighed. Then he said, "Well, I'm really, really busy because of it!"
When I went to the Apple Store today, I planned to pick up the new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a new keyboard. For the past year I have been using (and loving) the Macally iceKey—with its laptop-depth keys it reduces strain on my fingers and I've never been more comfortable typing in years, but its non-Apple-standard key sizes and one blank key1 drive me nuts on a regular basis. So when I heard Apple was releasing a laptop-depth keyboard I was thrilled.
Turns out they didn't have them in stock today in stores. But I did get to play with one, and I found some very strange things.
First, Apple has decided that the wired version of the keyboard should be full size, but the Bluetooth version isn't. It's missing the delete, insert, home, et cetera island, and the number pad. In fact, the Bluetooth version looks exactly like the MacBook keyboard, but with aluminum backing. The wired version has the whole keyboard layout. I'm not sure why they decided on this, and I don't think I agree with it. Sure, making the BT version smaller makes it more portable, but I don't think people are moving them around quite enough that it's worth shorting them the ability to input numbers conveniently.
Second, and far stranger, is the new layout of function (or F) keys. The wired keyboard now has up to F19, and no dedicated volume controls. Instead, it moves the volume controls to special functions on F10, F11 and F12. You might remember those as two Expose keys and the Dashboard key. Well, not anymore. In fact, F9, the other default Expose key, is now fast-forward/next track. And the eject key, which has nearly always been the last key in the upper right of the keyboard is next to F12. Not on the end in the wired version. But it gets even stranger:
The F3 key's special function is Expose: All windows. F3? Are they serious? F4 is Dashboard. Since when are F3 and F4 easy to hit keys? They're in no-man's land up there. And are we just supposed to stop using any other Expose functionality? There are no keys with the other two functions. And, while we're at it, I should mention that the volume controls have been changed, order-wise, from the usual desktop keyboard layout. It used to be volume down, volume up, mute. Now it matches the laptop arrangement, which swaps mute to the left instead of the right.
And here's where it gets fun: you can, much like on a laptop, disable the special functionality of the keys and switch to regular function key use using System Preferences, after which you can assign things to the keys you wish. That is, except the volume keys. Because when you turn off the special functions, there is no way to bind the volume keys to, say, the F16-18 keys which are useless on the keyboard otherwise. So if you want to use the keyboard the way you're used to, you won't be able to control volume without holding the "fn" key, which allows you to use the special functions temporarily when they're disabled.
So why did Apple make all of these random changes? Truthfully, I'm not sure. The new keyboard looks like it was meant to be a laptop keyboard (it functions nearly identically to the current MB and MBP boards), which doesn't make much sense. How frequently are people adjusting brightness (dedicated special function keys F1 and F2) on a desktop? I'd guess very rarely.
All this aside, the keys are really quite nice to type on and I still plan to order one for the sake of my fingers. But I'm going to have to figure out a way to bind the keys the way I want them—that is, to have them work the way the desktop keyboards have worked for years.
With all the talk and speculation and rumors about OS X Leopard being close to release quality, and with "spring 2007" coming closer and closer, I'm beginning to get a little worried that the new version of OS X won't have a new visual look.
Many months ago, when Jobs mentioned that there were super secret things in 10.5 that they didn't want to announce yet, I was really hoping one of them was a refined user interface. I kept holding onto that dream until some time last week when I realized that there just isn't time.
For Apple to have a new user interface they still haven't shown testers seems insane to me. It doesn't leave nearly enough lead time before release, even if "spring 2007" means June.
Obviously, I hope I'm wrong. But it's beginning to sink in that I might not be.
My new Airport Extreme Base Station arrived earlier this week and I finally got a chance to set it up last night. After some initial frustration caused by my VoIP phone router, which I eventually solved, I had the AEBS in place where a LinkSys 802.11G WiFi router used to be.
Previously, I had flashed said LinkSys router with the open-source DD-WRT firmware to add features LinkSys leaves out of its stock firmware and administration software—namely, the ability to reserve IP addresses for clients who regularly connect to the network and boost transmitter power.
Why are those two features important? The network setup in our apartment is all wireless and pretty continuous, so I'd rather every device that's normally connected always use the same IP (this makes it easier to open ports for various things like the XBOX 360). One side effect to having an all-wireless network in our apartment is the living room and office are separated by a few walls, one of which is filled with brick and plaster (an old fireplace chimney hiding behind a wall), absolutely murdering signal strength. The default LinkSys firmware's transmitter only uses 19mW (or ~13dBm) of power, which is considered very low. Using DD-WRT, you can safely up your transmission power to increase signal strength and this worked wonders in our apartment, giving the farthest item (the XBOX 360) a 75% signal instead of the 25% it had before the firmware change.
Everything worked really well—I only had to reboot the router once in over a year (compared to somewhat regular reboots with the default firmware), signal was strong, things were good. So why change to the Aiport Extreme Base Station? Two reasons: Airport Disk and wireless printer sharing.
Airport Disk could really be considered the reason I made the change, but wireless printing is great too. Before the AEBS, I had a little D-Link ethernet print server in my network, allowing me to share the USB printer with anyone on the network. This worked fine but it was an extra device, more power, more configuration to worry about. The AEBS has standard support for USB printer sharing, so I was able to get rid of this extra network device.
In fact, the great thing about the new AEBS is the ability to plug a USB hub in and connect both a printer and multiple disks, all of which work immediately. Within two seconds, I had my printer shared via Bonjour and my disks mounted over wireless on both of our computers. Airport Disk has all the functionality you would expect—it allows disks to sleep when not in use and wakes them up when you access them and it automatically mounts them when they become available on the network, if you wish. From the Airport Utility you can unmount drives from users as well.
The whole point of the Aiport Disk technology for me is simple: I want to move my music and pictures to a central network location that I can access from any computer. I want this because I want to save hard drive space on my MacBook Pro, and because I want Katia to be able to play all of our music as well (previously, she'd have to open my laptop and then browse my shared library in iTunes). Between the 40GB of photos and 20GB of music I've got, my 100GB MBP hard drive was filling up quickly. Back ups were slower. And it just didn't make sense to carry all that stuff around.
When I'm away from home, if I want to hear music I use my iPod. I don't need to carry my entire music library with me on two drives. And when I'm at home, I want to be able to hear my music no matter which computer I might be using (or over the stereo using Airport Express). Airport Disk allows you to do that.
The process for moving my music and photo libraries was a little nerve-wracking. After making a full back-up of my MBP, I copied all the media over to the external drive and hooked it up to the AEBS. To update iTunes, I did the following:
Why the gapless playback determination took so long, I don't know. In total time spent (including waiting), this was a long process, but it was worth it. Now when I open iTunes I can play all my music from my laptop without wasting space. Tonight I'm going to set up Katia the same way.
I've yet to handle the iPhoto library stuff, once I do that I'll report on how it goes.
All in all, I'm extremely pleased with the AEBS so far. Its stronger transmitter (100mW or 20dBm) is sending 98% signal to the XBOX 360, which is a near 25% improvement, even though I have it set to G/B compatible mode. It also allows for IP reservation. Granted, this is all making me yearn for an N card in my laptops, but in the mean time things are good and I've finally got hard drive space again.
file://localhost/Users/garrett/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/ to file://localhost/Volumes/Media%20Book%20I/Music/ ↩I'm still completely in love with my MacBook Pro1, but I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't have a draft-N Airport card and that there's no way to upgrade it.
One good thing about the old days of buying an Airport card and installing it yourself was that there was an Airport card you could take out and replace if you wanted to. My MacBook Pro was the first machine I've ever purchased where the Aiport card was a feature that had to be included at the point of sale and wasn't user installable or removable. And, as such, now with Apple releasing draft-N-compatible cards, I'm out of luck.
This is unfortunate for several reasons, the biggest of which is that everything in our apartment is running on wifi at this point. I've got my MBP and Katia's MB, as well as a plethora of other devices2 all running in 802.11g mode. Now don't get me wrong, it's fast, but when one of us is uploading photos to Flickr, you definitely feel the slowdown on all other devices. And by slowdown I mean all other devices absolutely crawl.
Hoping there might be an option for upgrades to machines like mine, I stopped by the Apple Store to ask a "genius." He said (I'm paraphrasing here) Apple didn't plan to offer upgrades to older machines, in part because the new draft-N cards uses three-wire antennas and the older cards have two-wire antennas, so the upgrade would be more than just the card itself.
It looks like the only solution for non-N-enabled MacBook Pro users will be to use an ExpressCard/34 device, something like the one Belkin released at MacWorld this year. Of course, then you've got a big hunk of plastic sticking out of the side of your laptop, which isn't too pleasant or sleek. And, of course, this doesn't help MacBook users who don't have the slot. They'll need to use a USB device which is even clunkier.
Obviously, there's only so much complaining you can do about things like this—computers evolve and technology improves and you'll never be able to have it all for very long. It still stings, though.
On a side note, I think the new Aiport Extreme pages on the Apple site are some of the most attractive product pages I've ever seen them do. That background gradient and the colors are really nice.
My butt is sore from literally sitting on the edge of my seat for two hours yesterday as Apple introduced the iPhone, hitherto referred to as Apple's greatest achievement. That might sound like a hyperbole, but it's really not: Apple builds great computers, makes great software and created an excellent music player, and this combines all of them. This is the device we've all been talking about for 10 years. The thing we meant when we were saying, "One day, we'll have one device that does everything..." That day is today (well, okay, it's actually a day in June).
I love mobile phones. Since 1999, I have had thirteen phones1 (a few of them only briefly) and my biggest complaint is that none of them, not one was what I really wanted in a phone. Currently, I carry my mobile phone, my iPod, a small camera (usually), a voice recorder for recording ideas, pens and a small notebook every day. It doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up. And, with all of that, I still can't browse the internet full-scale, send real email or check my location on a map. And I surely can't send the ideas that I record to friends.
And let's talk about interfaces. I've seen them all—from no color to five colors to full-color, from LED to LCD (STN to TFT!)—and they all fail in comparison to Apple's 160ppi iPhone screen. Just take a look at the demo or photos of the phone and you'll realize, immediately, how truly awful current phones' screens are in comparison. Now, with pixels per inch we're only talking about how it looks, but how does it work? Apple has put OS X on a phone and honestly, that's the best part. Shawn made a good point yesterday in that Apple's real marvel here was getting OS X on a mobile phone. Once they did that, the rest was gravy. Beautiful software, that's just par for the OS X course. Now it's on a phone and they can go nuts.
There are many innovations here (and I'm sure we'll see them all detailed more and more as it gets closer to release) that leave current mobile phones in the dust. Visual voicemail. Multi-touch interface2. Proximity sensors to save battery life and accelerometers to switch viewing state. Two batteries, one dedicated to the iPod functionality so you don't run out of juice and can't make calls (I might be wrong about this, perhaps it's just one battery with software-controlled usage). 8GB of storage. A real, full-featured email client and web browser. Wi-Fi. And, of course, it's got tons of the standard features as well, like Bluetooth, Quad-band capabilities, EDGE and a 2 megapixel camera.
I mean, my god. It almost sounded like a joke when Jobs kept listing features for 45 minutes. This is truly the gadget of my dreams.
Of course, there had to be a downside: the Cingular lock-in. Luckily for NYC-area residents, this shouldn't be an issue3, but for people who live in a weak-signal or non-Cingular area, this will really dampen the excitement. Who knows what's going to happen in Canada and Europe. This also means you'll have to sign another 2-year contract, and, if I know Cingular, customers currently in a contract without upgrade rights will have to pay full price for the phone (which will probably be $699/799 USD). I was really hoping Apple would take Cingular to task and force them to change some of their policies but that's wishing for a lot since Cingular has 52 million customers.
In the end, my excitement for this device can be summed up by listening to the crowd at the Moscone center when Jobs announced the device yesterday. June cannot come soon enough, and I'll be right in the front of the line when the iPhone is released.
A few quick thoughts on the Wireless Mighty Mouse:
Or, if you're like me, buy it because you're on an endless quest to find the "perfect mouse." Then, after a few hours of trying to force yourself to like it, realize that that $30 Logitech wireless mouse you bought is actually pretty great, aside from the fact that it has a USB dongle with 2.4GHz wireless instead of Bluetooth. But then realize that it actually works, and it's smooth, and it's half the price.
I wanted the Wireless Mighty Mouse to be good. I really did.
One of the toys I ordered after the sale of my Quad arrived this week, but, unfortunately, it arrived broken.
The white 2GHz MacBook, customized with a 100GB hard drive, is a replacement for our older PowerBook, which we sold to a friend. The MB will be our living-room machine and Katia's primary computer. With my luck, it showed up early but broken. Well, not "broken," really, but not flawless.
The machine vibrates like crazy. Like, not good, what the hell, it's hurting my hands vibrating. All the time, non-stop, fun, fun, fun. Oh, and there's a dead pixel in the center of the display. Not good. I've had plenty of Apple portables, and none of them vibrated so, after a call to Apple, it's being replaced. The only problem is, of course, I have to send this one back. So now we're waiting again, without a computer at home.
Aside from the issues with the computer, I will say that the MacBook is truly impressive—I instantly fell in love with it. I'm excited for it to return.
Now, hopefully, the other toys will all be flawless when they arrive next week.
Update: Sold!
I'm selling my Power Mac G5 Quad. I don't use it nearly enough to justify keeping it. This is the ultimate studio machine or application server, and I just don't need the speed or beastly power. Don't get me wrong—I love it. I've just realized in the past few months that I use the laptop much more and I don't want to be tethered to a room anymore.
The beast is as follows:
You can see a few photos of the machine in my Quad set on Flickr. It's covered under AppleCare until December 28, 2008.
Also included with the machine:
What this package is worth:
What I'm selling it for, excluding shipping:
$3,299, which is $349 cheaper than a standard Quad with AppleCare would cost you from Apple (even more savings if you consider tax). Sold!
You save over a thousand dollars on this package.
I would love to sell this to someone local to NYC, but I'm willing to ship it if necessary. I estimate shipping will cost around $150 in the US, I'm not sure about shipping to a foreign country but will consider it.
Determined both to enter the hourly raffle for a MacBook and to see the new Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Shawn and I made the journey in at 12:30AM and, after searching for parking for thirty minutes and standing in line for twenty, we're now walking around playing with the new machines.
The new store is nice, although it's hard to get a good grasp of the size due to the amount of people in here right now. The cube, of course, is very impressive (I've taken plenty of photos but must wait until I'm home to upload them). Wish us luck in the raffle! It's late!
Update: Well, we didn't win. It was still fun to go, though. I've uploaded a few pictures from the night to Flickr. Shawn also found us in the timelapse!
Since I'm heavily considering purchasing a new MacBook Pro, I've been keeping up with reviews and thoughts I've come across in the last few days.
After my initial post on the MacBook Pro, I received several emails from readers asking me to let them know what I learned, or at least post about it. Consider this that post, ongoing. Links to MacBook Pro-related news and information, as well as my periodic thoughts on the subject:
So I assume you made it through the Apple event without buying anything?
How well I'm known. This recent Apple event wasn't anything special, but in the past, keynotes have been very dangerous to me and my money. I didn't buy anything announced yesterday, and I don't plan to (a Mac mini would be fun for a media server, but it just isn't necessary for me right now).
I am, however, planning on buying a MacBook Pro in the near future, to replace my two-year-old PowerBook G4. I have a 1GHz model and it's starting to feel a little slow. I've been waiting to read more reviews and see how people like them—buying a revision A product from Apple is usually dangerous (and I do it frequently)—especially people who have upgraded the hard drive to 7200 RPM and people who have opted for the processor upgrades.
When I asked Shawn if it sounded silly to buy a new notebook, he said:
Once you bought the Quad, you sort of set the precident of no longer needing to justify any computer spending.
I guess I would agree with that. While purchasing a new MacBook Pro to replace a two-year-old PowerBook G4 is less insane than buying a Quad to replace a Dual-2GHz G5, I have sort of set a bar that will be hard to raise.
If you have a MacBook Pro, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the machine. Oh, and in case you're wondering—I still hate the name MacBook Pro.
Seeing this screenshot of Todd Dominey's Mac running OS X 10.1 "Puma" from 2002 made me smile today. Hell, I didn't even like Macs in 2002—it was OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" that convinced me I was wrong—but to see 10.1 and compare it to todays 10.4 "Tiger" only three and a half years later (Tiger was released in 2005), it's amazing to see what Apple has accomplished. The interface is smoother and smarter in nearly all aspects, and OS X is jammed full of great apps now to boot.
Compare this to the three plus years between Windows 98 and Windows XP, in which Microsoft made the user interface uglier. Compare Windows XP to the forthcoming "Vista", six years in development, which basically adds transparency to the interface and attempts, in countless ways, to emulate the look of OS X.
If Apple can constantly release great software that gets better and better, why can't everyone else?
A week ago, I purchased a new Power Mac G5 Quad. My older G5 is now for sale. I would prefer to sell it locally, since it would be a pain to ship, but if you're interested in buying it and wouldn't mind paying shipping, please email me at garrett at maniacalrage dot net.
You can see some photos of both the new Quad and my quest to reorganize my office on Flickr.
Update: Sold!